Beans, beans the magical fruit.

You know you sang that song when you were a kid in school.  And with the title of this post being just that, I hope I got the song stuck in all of your heads :)

Aaron, a blog writer, a fellow blog reader and a friend of a friend has done a little bit on his blog on his quest to “Learn One New Thing” .  He tries to learn one new thing a day and then he blogs about it.  I love reading them and have even learned a few thing right along side of him.  (Example: you can cook bacon on a waffle iron or George Forman grill for perfectly crisp bacon.  Keeps the grease and smell from over taking your kitchen. Try it!)

I inherited the ham bone after Easter dinner on Sunday. A few years ago my mother in law made a delicious bean and ham soup and for the past 3 years, using her recipe, I have done the same thing.  I was looking on the internet for some tips on making bean soup and ran across a handful of people who mentioned that they “degas” their beans before they make the soup.  Degas? This sounded interesting.  I read further.  It turns out, you use a simple tedious method of boiling the beans in water along with a tablespoon of baking soda.  You do this procedure three times and after the third, your beans are, supposedly, degassed. What exactly is degassed—well I refer to the song from above.  Apparently this is supposed to help those individuals who are affected with the curse of the stinkies after eating beans.  Oh?  You say. Beans don’t affect me like that.  Hooie. I say to you.  You know you are all affected by the bean curse…

So I set out to try this.  I figured what could it hurt.  I learned two new things with this process. 1. Adding baking soda to beans and boiling water has the affect similar to an erupting volcano. Oops.  This I found out the hard way.  Foam and water and brunt stuff all over my stovetop.  2. Beans swell. Pot not big enough.

I finished the process, continued on with the soup and could only be a judge on if it worked or not once the soup was consumed.  Well, we ate it last night.  Besides being delicious, the degassing worked!!

All was quiet and fresh in the Eid house last night.